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A Grizzled Troubadour Dusts Off His Bowler

Although he has had only one gold album in the United States — in 2006 — Tom Waits is cherished by his generation of musicians as skillful songwriter and uncompromising outsider.Credit
Drew Kelly for The New York Times

PETALUMA, Calif.

ON an impulse, or so it seemed, Tom Waits pulled his S.U.V. onto the railroad tracks that run behind his favorite defunct truck stop: a place formerly called Rhinehardt’s, now locked up and out of business with its old Formica lunch counter still visible in the dusty interior. About a half-hour earlier, as we were conversing in the parking lot, a train had rushed past with its whistle hooting. “What if I just turned the car off and I can’t get it started again?” he asked. “You O.K. with that? Let’s just live dangerously.”

He cut the engine and gazed out along the tracks. And after a suitably dramatic pause he started up again and pulled off, smiling at the little burst of what-if adrenaline. “It’s a lifesaver, adrenaline,” he said in his famously gravelly voice. “I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.”

Adrenaline and restlessness course through “Bad as Me” (Anti-), Mr. Waits’s new album and first full set of new songs since “Real Gone” in 2004. Mr. Waits, who largely shuns interviews, was diligently promoting it, showing some personal landmarks in the Northern California town where he has long resided.

At 61 Mr. Waits is acclaimed as an American marvel: a songwriter who can be smart and primal, raucous and meticulous, ethereal and earthy, bleak and comical. He has sung about drunks, tramps, carnies and killers, spinning tall tales and reeling off free-associations that somehow add up; he has also shown a vulnerable side in tender, unironic love songs. He has been recording for four decades and persisting on his own terms, particularly since 1980. That’s when he married Kathleen Brennan, who became his partner in songwriting and production and helped forge a sound to match his voice and their lyrics: part old weird America, part junk sculpture, part mad-scientist experiment, part cartoon, part hellfire sermon, part throw-down.

This year Mr. Waits was inaugurated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he told the black-tie music-business crowd, “They say I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing.” Now he said, “The only thing worse than being in the Hall of Fame is not being in the Hall of Fame.”

Although he has had only one gold album in the United States — the 2006 collection of new and old material, “Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards” — Mr. Waits is cherished by his generation of musicians, as skillful songwriter and uncompromising outsider. “I identify with those guys that draw with Tabasco sauce on cardboard with a nail, outsider guys,” he said. Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Rod Stewart and lately Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss on the Grammy-winning album “Raising Sand”) are among the many who have covered Mr. Waits’s songs. Yet his audience, he noted, is “not just old-timers like me listening to old-timers like me.”

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Tom Waits's “Bad as Me” is his first album of new material in seven years.Credit
Anton Corbijn

When Mr. Waits emerged in the 1970s, he had clearly studied Beat writers, jazz pioneers and Delta bluesmen. Now indie-rockers study him, emulating not only his rasp-and-growl vocals and spiky arrangements, but also his self-guided career path. He has never been beholden to airplay and — far more adamantly than younger bands — shuns deals with advertisers, whom he has successfully sued when they have tried to use Waits sound-alikes.

With Ms. Brennan, Mr. Waits became, in his words, “a mom-and-pop outfit” (they have three children), long before the major-label music business began to topple.

The seven years between new albums were active ones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Brennan assembled “Orphans.” Mr. Waits toured the Southern United States and Europe, released a live album, “Glitter and Doom Live,” and acted in movies (like “The Book of Eli” in 2010). Then came a burst of writing this year, which resulted in “Bad as Me.” The new songs “were all written in a reasonably short period of time and recorded right away,” he said. “It always seems to be like bakery goods or fish. People want to know if it’s fresh.”

Talking about the album now “is like doing the dishes,” he said. “The meal has already been prepared and eaten. We enjoyed it. But after every meal, clang, clack, clang, scrape, clang, clang, clack, scrape — you’ve got to do the dishes.” Compared with “Real Gone,” an album full of songs that clanged, scraped and bristled with distortion and cryptic lyrics, “Bad as Me” climbs off the ledge. “There’s less phlegm and there’s less smoke in the room.”

The lyrics are more straightforward, though no less generous with imagery. “You’re the head on the spear, you’re the nail on the cross/You’re the fly in my beer, you’re the key that got lost,” he tells a kindred spirit in the title song. It’s an album of love songs, cackling contemplations of death and, most often, songs about hitting the road. “I just want to get lost,” he declares over a blurred but robust rockabilly backbeat in “Get Lost.”

The arrangements reclaim the mixture of old-timey and surreal that Mr. Waits has long savored, with twangy guitars, pushy horns, woozy saloon piano and drumming that conjures roadhouses, music halls and military tattoos. There are half a dozen blues stomps, with none other than Keith Richards joining in the guitar scuffles with David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, and the eclectic sideman and bandleader Marc Ribot.

“Tom likes tunes with these monstrous grooves that kick you into playing,” Mr. Ribot, who has worked on many of Mr. Waits’s albums and toured with him, said by phone. “On this record it was less, ‘O.K., let’s be super rigorous and create music completely without precedent,’ and more just ’Let’s rock the house.’ ”

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Tom Waits often collaborates with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, right, with the singer in 1982.Credit
Robin Platzer/Getty Images

Midway through the album there are also three slow-dance songs in a row. “Back in the Crowd” is a mariachi-tinged country ballad — it begins, “If you don’t want these arms to hold you/If you don’t want these lips to kiss you” — that could have been on an old Marty Robbins album. Ms. Brennan pushed for concision when she and her husband began writing songs for the album in February. “Kathleen wanted to do three-minute songs, 12 of ’em,” Mr. Waits said. “I was dumping verses all over the place, and cutting things. I was pretty good with the razor, compared to how I usually am.” (The album ended up with 13 songs on its standard release, 16 on a deluxe version.)

Mr. Waits was seeking to write, he said, “dwell-in songs,” a phrase used by a woman he learned about in a collection of folk songs from Alabama. “Like a blues, you get down there and you start dwelling on a particular topic,” he said. “I was really taken with that, that it was something simple and it evoked so much.”

His songs and arrangements often smack of bleary late nights. But he prefers to record, surprisingly, first thing in the morning. “I used to think that great albums were made at 3 in the morning, until I tried recording at 3 in the morning. And then it was like: ‘Oh, man, I missed it. I’m out of gas,’ ” he said. “At 9:30, 10 o’clock, no one’s heard anything yet, they’re clean. Most of ’em haven’t even had breakfast yet, so this is breakfast.”

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He offers his sidemen suggestions: “ ‘I want you to play like you’re 7 years old at a recital. I want you to play like your mom’s in the room. I want you to play like you’re miles from home, and your legs are dangling from a boxcar. Or play like your hair’s on fire. Play like you have no pants on.’ ”

Although the songs often sound like one scrappy band playing live, that’s an illusion. Mr. Ribot, Mr. Hidalgo and Mr. Richards worked separately, coming to California for days at a time and overdubbing parts, to be mixed afterward. Meanwhile Mr. Waits’s voice — barking and hollering, gruffly crooning or floating in a rickety yet steadfast falsetto — is usually a one-take performance. “I always say, ‘Just slap up any mike, this is a temporary vocal, and we’ll get the real one later,’ ” he said. “But they know that that’s not true, so they don’t listen to me. You have to work with people that know when to trick you.”

Mr. Hidalgo, by telephone, said: “Every time Tom does a song it’s a performance, not a run-through. It’s different every time, so it’s like a throwback to the way people used to make records.”

In unscripted conversation, Tom Waits the performer — with the buzz in his voice, the metaphorical mind-set and the strange-but-true fact at his fingertips — is recognizable in the thoughtful songwriter who discusses the craft of recording handclaps and the serendipity of meaning found in triple rhymes. He slings those in a new song, “After You Die,” a long list of similes — “like a tramp choir crying/like a campfire dying”— to ponder oblivion.

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Tom Waits with Neil Young at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in March; Mr. Waits was inducted.Credit
Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

“There’s truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game,” he said. “That’s what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.”

Mr. Waits’s black Suburban was cluttered. On the passenger seat was a yellowing newspaper announcing the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. A large bottle of Valencia Mexican hot sauce rolled on the floor. Atop a pile covering the back seat were a bowler hat and a glittery sequined jacket. “I have the pants to match,” he said.

Under the clothing were LPs akin to Mr. Waits’s own music: Captain Beefheart, Willy DeVille and an album by the blues harmonica virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite, who also plays on the album. Digging further, Mr. Waits came up with an old sarsaparilla bottle, discovered, he said, while scavenging the truck stop’s parking lot.

History informs some of the songs on “Bad as Me.” The opener, “Chicago,” bustles with a plinking banjo and back-and-forth saxophone chatter, as Mr. Waits turns into a narrator deciding to “leave all we’ve ever known/For a place we’ve never seen,” hinting at the Great Migration that began a century ago, bringing millions of black Southerners north via Chicago.

Other songs face the present. “Hell Broke Luce” — a title knifed into a wall at Alcatraz by an inmate during a prison riot, Mr. Waits said — details the miseries of soldiers back from the Middle East, over a semi-martial beat. In “Talking at the Same Time,” a kind of hollowed-out shuffle, he observes, “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind.”

“I’m not really qualified to discuss any of these matters on a political level,” he said. “I always imagine you sit at a piano with an open window, and whatever is out there will come in, pass through you and then turn into a song.”

A waltz called “Last Leaf” — with Mr. Richards joining on vocals — celebrates the image of a lone leaf clinging to a tree: “The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” Mr. Waits sings. It’s tempting to hear it as a manifesto of stubborn persistence, but Mr. Waits shrugged that off.

“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ ” he said. “I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2011, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grizzled Troubadour Dusts Off His Bowler. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe